


Time It Was (And What A)

by Scribe



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-31
Updated: 2009-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-05 13:25:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribe/pseuds/Scribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto didn't know when the houseplant had appeared in Jack's room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time It Was (And What A)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://kashmir1.livejournal.com/profile)[**kashmir1**](http://kashmir1.livejournal.com/) from the prompt "house plants." Title from Simon &amp; Garfunkel's Bookends/Old Friends.

Ianto didn't know when the houseplant had appeared in Jack's room. It hadn't been there before he'd left with the Doctor and it had been there about a month after he'd returned, so there was an obvious assumption to be made, but he still couldn't be sure.

Their relationship had taken a strange turn after Jack's dramatic reappearance. In public they'd been the same, all barely-veiled comments and heated looks, but in private they'd somehow...stopped. They didn't talk about it- that, at least, was normal. Instead, Ianto compiled mental lists of possibilities. They could have each been waiting for a signal from the other, or thinking it over, or already decided. Jack was recovering from whatever horrible thing he'd endured and wouldn't tell them about and was in all likelihood recovering from the Doctor, too. Ianto differed by the day over whether he thought those two were the same. In any event, it was nearly a month before he descended to Jack's quarters again, so the question of the houseplant could not be resolved.

It had been a truly awful day, in the way that only Torchwood could manage. They'd spent nearly fourteen hours exterminating a burrow of infant purplish-black scuttling things. It was thankless work; the scuttling things were rather cute until they felt threatened, at which point they hissed out a low-grade acid that ate through clothing and left a raw, stinging rash wherever it touched skin.

"Think of it as putting down a rabid dog," Jack had said. They'd all got used to killing long ago, so Ianto wondered why he'd said it. He was still remembering what Torchwood was like, maybe, or he wanted to pretend to himself that the life he'd returned to wasn't too violent for platitudes. There was also the possibility that he was going to try to make them more- more what, human? Innocent?- simply by believing it hard enough and closing his eyes to everything else. That was a certainly a disturbing possibility, but it was also on some level a reassuringly Jack thing to do.

Ianto gave up contemplating it when Tosh cornered the last tiny alien and went to find Jack instead. It didn't take long. The mother- or father, or incubator, or _whatever_, he'd learned not to assume- of the scuttling things was a dead giveaway. It looked about the same as the babies they'd been chasing all day, except this one was about twelve feet high and very, very dead.

Jack, somewhat surprisingly, was not. He was sprawled on his back in a gritty, shallow depression, about ten feet in diameter and stark against the surrounding grass. Apart from his breath, he didn't stir. Ianto would have taken him for dead if he hadn't been completely naked, but as it was the rise and fall of his bare chest drew the eye and held it.

"Captain?" he called, and then, "Jack?" There was no answer. Ianto walked over, giving the dead thing a wide berth, and knelt beside him. Jack's whole body was tense, eyes wide open and staring at the night sky but clearly seeing something else. Ianto winced. Unless he missed his guess- and he didn't often- that meant that not only had Jack just been killed in a wash of acid, he was actually reliving a _previous_ time that had happened.

"Jack?" he said again. Torchwood probably had some kind of protocol for dealing with people in the midst of traumatic flashbacks, but he couldn't remember ever learning it and certainly didn't remember anyone applying it to him. Against his better judgment, he reached out and lightly touched Jack's shoulder.

His wrist was captured in a painfully strong grip almost too fast for him to process, arm twisted into an angle he could withstand but still would have preferred not to test. Jack was sitting bolt upright, gasping for breath.

"Jack, it's me, Ianto," he said, keeping his voice as calm as possible. He watched as Jack slowly returned from whatever memory he'd been lost in. The hand on his wrist gentled and then let go altogether, coming to rest on his knee instead.

"Ianto," Jack repeated. Fully collected now, he looked down at his own naked body and then back up at Ianto, whose suit was at least mostly intact. "Well, this isn't fair at all," he said with a smirk.

That was typical Jack. There was something else, though, something different. It was in the way his hand was tense and warm on Ianto's knee, the way he looked directly into Ianto's eyes and held the gaze. It was...grounded. He was more present in that moment than Ianto had ever seen him, except when someone's life was in danger.

 

The memory of that look was what gave him the courage to search Jack out later, with the hub quiet after Owen had finished distributing salve and bandages for the acid burns. He made coffee first. There wasn't much of a reason to- in all likelihood a single cup had nothing more than a placebo effect on any of them at this point and Jack barely slept anyway- but it was something familiar to both of them. So he had a mug in each hand as he stood at the edge of the manhole, taking a rare moment to observe before announcing his presence. That was when he first saw the houseplant. Jack was staring at it intently, brushing his fingers over the leaves with a gentleness that bypassed Ianto's intellect and went straight for his memories.

"Should I be jealous?" he called down after a minute. It was a well-planned question. Interpreted one way, it meant 'are you having sexual relations with that plant?', in which case Ianto was almost entirely sure he was joking. Another way, it meant 'as I am defined in relation to you do I have the right to be jealous?', in which case he wasn't joking at all.

Jack, who avoided Ianto's careful plans with a frequency that made one wonder if he really could read minds, negated the whole exercise by simply declining to answer.

"Coming down?" he asked instead, walking over and taking the coffee without waiting for an answer. Ianto climbed down the ladder and perched on the edge of Jack's bed, waiting for his own mug to be given back. Instead, Jack set them both down on the small table and handed Ianto the houseplant instead.

At his expectant look Ianto examined it, matching his own carefulness to what he'd seen from Jack. The plant wasn't much to look at. It had a short, slightly woody stem that split into three green shoots and a number of small, flat leaves. The leaves had a bluish sheen that was a little out of the ordinary, but other than that there was really nothing remarkable about it.

"What is it?" he asked eventually, willing as ever to play Jack's games.

"_Lli eviol_. Othewise known as The Time Traveler's Bane."

Ianto raised an eyebrow. "You made that up."

"Yes, but it's good," said Jack, completely unashamed at being caught out. "Scientists shouldn't be allowed to name things. They never put any drama into it. Besides, it's fitting. They come from this tiny little backwater planet, all rock desert and almost no sunlight, can't even support sentient life. Resources are so limited that these plants have evolved to reproduce as slowly as possible, just enough for the species to survive without giving itself any competition. They only flower about once every seven hundred years."

Things slotted into place. "Did you go there with the Doctor?" Ianto asked, voice steady but not daring to look up from the plant in case his face wasn't the same. To his surprise, Jack laughed.

"Nowhere close. Time Traveler's Bane, remember? The reason they're so special is that they're extremely sensitive to fluctuations in time. No one's sure why, but land a time ship anywhere near them and they'll miss the next flowering cycle altogether, won't get back on track for at least three hundred years. The Intergalactic Endangered Species Trust had to put a block around the entire planet to keep them from getting wiped out altogether, what with every engineer who thought they'd overcome disturbance wanting to land their new ship there to test it out. Not the Doctor's kind of place. He's not exactly a patient man."

"And you are?" said Ianto, who had won every waiting game he'd ever played, from staring contests to seductions, and who was not yet thirty years old.

"I'm working on it." Jack stood, took the plant back and handed Ianto his coffee. "I've never been to this little guy's home, though," he said, tapping the side of the earthenware pot. "One of the seed pods came through the rift. I killed a few trying to figure out what nutrients they needed, but this one seems to be doing pretty well. Better than I'd expect, actually- I think it likes being around me, what with the whole fixed point thing. I'm probably about as temporally stable as anything ever gets."

Ianto didn't know what that meant, but the value of information about Jack was just as much about him giving it to you as it was about understanding it. Fixed point, he thought, and made a mental note to ponder it at some other time.

Jack replaced the plant on the table and picked up his own mug. "I'm keeping you, sorry," he said. "Did you want something?"

"Only to see if you did."

He said nothing, just looked at Ianto for a long moment. It reminded him immediately of the incident earlier, the one that had sent him down here for the first time in months.

"Stay here tonight?" Jack asked eventually, and Ianto was nodding before he even thought about it. They probably wouldn't get up to much; his skin was a splotchy patchwork of rashes from where the acid had eaten through his suit and Jack was cocooned in as many layers as Ianto had ever seen him wear, looking (understandably) as though he'd never like to be naked again. Still, a night with Jack was infinitely preferable to a night on his own.

  
It was pitch dark in Jack's quarters once the lights were off. They lay side by side, fully clothed and careful of each other's injuries- all of them.

"Jack?" Ianto asked after a long while. "Would you do something for me?"

"What?"

"That plant- keep it with you, if you can, or grow another one. And then every seven hundred years when it flowers take a minute to remember Torchwood, even if you're a million light-years away." He didn't say _remember me_, finding it to be both sappy and unlikely and, surprisingly, not exactly what he wanted.

The bed dipped beside him and then a warm hand fumbled at his shoulder, moved up to cup his face.

"I can do that," Jack said, and the touch lingered for a moment before disappearing.

Ianto sighed. He'd meant to confront Jack tonight, to pin him down to something resembling a definition in regards to the two of them, but then again he'd only sort of half planned that because it never worked. He had a promise, at least, which seemed strangely important. More important than a declaration. Beyond that, there was just Jack's breathing beside him in the dark and no way to know where their relationship was going, except here.


End file.
